Recognizing that something has changed is one thing. Adjusting your leadership to what the change now requires is another.
When Leena Nair left Unilever after thirty years to become Global CEO of Chanel, one of her mentors gave her a way to think about what she was walking into. He told her to remember she was doing a quadruple jump. She asked what he meant, and he began naming what was changing. She was moving from HR to CEO, from a public company to a private one, and from an Anglo-Dutch heritage to a French one. The fourth, which she has described often since, was the move from fast-moving consumer goods to luxury.
Four changes, arriving at the same time.
What I find useful is what he didn’t do. He didn’t hand her one enormous transition and wish her luck. He handed her four, each with its own demands, which is a far more workable problem.
Look at it through the inflection-point lens and all four categories were in play at once. Her Role changed. Her Context changed across industry, ownership, culture, and business model. The CEO seat broadened the Capabilities she was accountable for. And the distance between mass-market consumer goods and luxury asked for a Mindset recalibration around assumptions she’d built over three decades in a different business.
Most inflection points don’t arrive four at a time. Nair’s is an edge case, and the point is that the layering is visible in a way it usually isn’t.
It also exposes the harder problem. Naming what changed doesn’t close the gap.
There’s almost always a lag between seeing that the situation has moved and adjusting your leadership to it. Your role can change before your leadership identity does. A new organization can surface assumptions you didn’t know you were carrying. The demands around you can expand faster than your capabilities do. And a familiar way of thinking will keep producing answers after the situation started asking different questions.
For the organization, that lag is where the cost sits. A capable executive can be intellectually aware that things have changed and still be running the previous version of their leadership for quarters at a time. Everyone feels the friction, but almost no one can clearly point to where it’s coming from.
Success Builds More Than Experience
The good news and the bad news is that by the time you reach senior leadership you’ve accumulated a lot more than a resume.
You’ve built instincts that enable you to read certain situations fast. Your intuition is built on a repository of knowing which moves tend to work, and you’ve learned where to push and when to wait. Over the course of your career, your strengths have been tested repeatedly, and people have rewarded you for using them well.
And somewhere in all of that you also formed beliefs. You likely have a belief about what strong leadership looks like, and how decisions should get made. You’ve codified for yourself what earns credibility, how much control a leader should keep, and what people need from you when the pressure rises.
That’s what experience is supposed to do. It gives you a library of patterns and better judgment, and most days it serves you well.
But it also makes some of those patterns harder to question. Because the more often something has worked, the more reasonable it feels to trust it again. Your style becomes your strength, the strength becomes part of your reputation, and eventually the way you lead stops feeling like a choice and starts feeling like who you are.
That’s the experience paradox. And it’s where recalibration gets uncomfortable, because you can understand perfectly well that the situation changed and still be running the version of your leadership that succeeded before the change.
Here’s what I notice most. What becomes limiting is almost always something that was valuable first.
Think about it. Deep expertise made you credible, so you naturally stay close to the work, sometimes closer than the role needs. Urgency helped you drive results, so you keep applying pressure in a situation that’s asking for steadiness instead. Conviction served you well, and gave people something to follow, but now opposing views start registering as obstacles instead of information. Independence built your reputation, and now the job runs on influence rather than pure authority. Your strengths still hold. Yet what may not hold is the way you’re expressing them.
Recalibration Is More Precise Than Reinvention
When leaders hear that their leadership needs to change, they usually assume it means becoming someone else. That’s a reasonable thing to assume, and it’s also why people stall. Becoming someone else is an impossible assignment, so nothing happens.
Recalibration asks for something smaller and harder. You look honestly at who you’ve become as a leader, then decide what still serves you and what doesn’t, what needs more range, what needs to be expressed differently, and what you’re leaning on mostly because it worked before.
Sometimes the adjustment sits in the role, and the work is to stop creating value where you built your reputation and start creating it where the role needs it now. Sometimes it sits in context, where your approach is sound but your current organization runs on different rhythms. Often the work is in the thinking, where an assumption needs testing against evidence instead of being treated as evidence.
In many situations, the deeper work is identity. You’ve changed roles or organizations or direction, and part of your leadership is still anchored to the version of you that earned success before.
Nair’s account is useful here because of what she says stayed constant. She’s said her leadership style has not changed, that she leads from purpose and looks across client experience, people, and impact together. She’s also described the transition as unlearning and relearning, because consumer goods and luxury sit at opposite ends of the spectrum. One is built on mass availability and industrialized production. The other is built on rarity and craftsmanship, where a single jacket takes two hundred hours by hand.
Both of those are true at the same time. The style held. The assumptions underneath it got rebuilt.
What I’ve share here is Nair’s public account of her own transition, and a story told afterward is always tidier than living it was. What makes it useful isn’t proof. It’s that she named the dimensions of her own change with unusual precision, which is the step most leaders skip.
Identity Shift Isn’t the Same as Identity Expansion
That’s identity expansion, and it’s worth separating from an identity shift. A shift is what happens when the leader you’ve been doesn’t fit what’s required, and something has to be released rather than carried forward. Expansion is different. Nothing gets released. The identity has to grow large enough to hold responsibilities and contexts its earlier version wasn’t required to hold.
There’s research behind how that expansion happens. Herminia Ibarra studied professionals moving into more senior roles and found they don’t decide their way into a new identity. They experiment with what she called provisional selves, trying on versions that bridge the gap between who they currently are and what they believe the new role expects, then keeping what holds up against feedback. While the subjects of her study were consultants and bankers rather than sitting executives, the mechanism still applies.
Some inflection points ask for a shift. More of them ask for an expansion. Knowing which one you’re standing in front of changes what the work is. And sometimes it changes whether you take the work on at all.
Here’s a personal example. Years ago I was offered a position at a premier search firm, with a title others would perceive as a step up. Thinking it through, I spent two days metaphorically wearing a suit representing the firm and the role together, and examining how it fit. By the end of those two days I knew. Wearing that suit would mean taking a deep breath and pulling my stomach in every day, because it was two sizes too small. That’s uncomfortable, and the more important part is that it was misalignment instead of fit. When fit is off, energy and focus go the same way. A suit that’s two sizes too small puts you in a container with only enough room to perform at a fraction of your potential.
So, the question moves past what you need to do differently. It becomes who you need to become here, while staying grounded in what’s genuinely yours.
You Still Have to Lead While You’re Changing
Nair didn’t get to step away from the CEO job while she figured out how to lead Chanel. Neither do you.
You’re making decisions, running meetings, holding relationships, and being evaluated the whole time you’re working on your own adjustment. That’s what makes the middle of this so uncomfortable.
You can know you need to delegate more and still feel the pull to take the work back the moment something goes sideways. Or when a new context calls for more listening yet you still feel pressure to prove your value fast. Maybe you decide to be more collaborative and then realize you’ve turned a decision that needed you into a committee.
Sometimes when leaders finally see a pattern that isn’t serving them, the instinct is to swing hard the other way. It happens when an operator trying to be more strategic pulls back from details they still need. Or when the leader who realizes they’ve been too controlling starts delegating without enough clarity, and the team ends up more confused than they were before.
That isn’t recalibration. It’s a pendulum.
What you’re after is range. Knowing when the strength you’ve always relied on is right for the situation, and when it calls for you to access something else.
Which is why insight by itself rarely gets you there. The test comes when the situation hands your old pattern another opening.
That’s where this becomes practice. You try a different stance, you watch what changes, you notice where the friction drops and where it doesn’t, and you adjust again. Old patterns have years of evidence behind them. New ones don’t, and you build that evidence by using them.
It helps to watch the gap between what you intended and what people experienced. You may believe you’re giving someone autonomy while they experience you stepping back without direction. You may think you’re being decisive while others read it as closed. Intent matters, and impact is where leadership becomes visible.
Not every reaction around you is accurate. But every reaction is information. The discipline that makes a difference is staying curious long enough to hear what the reaction is telling you before you start defending against it.
What the Organization Experiences
None of this stays inside the leader.
An organization doesn’t experience your recalibration as insight. It experiences it through what starts happening differently. It might be that decisions get better, or that repeated issues stop escalating. Another signal is people knowing where their authority sits, which happens when a leader who had become a bottleneck starts making room for other people to think, decide and act.
The first return is usually subtle. It shows up when what used to go wrong starts happening less.
The static clears before the performance elevates.
This is an important point because organizations often expect leadership development to produce a visible spike. Yet much of the early evidence is risk reduction instead, whether that’s fewer reactive calls, less rework, more productive disagreement, or less friction around decisions that should have been straightforward. Then the broader effects start happening. Trust improves, teams operate with more confidence, and execution gets cleaner. The point is leadership capacity spreads instead of concentrating in one person. That’s what I call the Leadership Compound Effect.
The gradual changes are worth noting because development tends to be measured by what becomes newly visible.
The leader is where the recalibration happens. The organization is one of the places where the return shows up.
Where the Recalibration Is Taking You
Where this lands depends on where you’re standing.
If you’re between organizations, the outcome is landing well. That’s more than landing quickly or taking a role that looks right on paper but fits like a suit that’s either too small or oversized. It means understanding your leadership clearly enough to know what you’re carrying forward, what has changed, and what kind of situation fits the leader you’ve become. Otherwise, the risk is carrying an outdated version of yourself into the next organization and expecting the new context to make room for it, or carrying the new or future version of yourself into an organization that’s not ready for it.
If you’re already in the role, the outcome is leading more effectively. Closing the distance between what you intend and what people experience. Expanding your range where the situation asks for it, reading the environment more accurately, and making better decisions about where your leadership is worth the most.
For the organization, the outcome is a leader whose contribution matches what the business needs now rather than what it needed when the executive first stepped into the role. That reduces leadership risk, and it gives performance room to compound in the right direction.
The goal isn’t to become someone new every time the situation changes. It’s to stay close enough to your own leadership to notice when the situation is asking more of you, and then to expand enough to meet it.
That’s the discipline underneath recalibration.
And that brings us to a question worth asking yourself regularly:
Who am I practicing becoming?
This article is the companion article to: Leadership at the Inflection Point
